Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation

by Mackrell, Judith

  When Marcel had first suggested to his publishers that he should write Josephine’s memoirs they thought he was joking; in 1926, it was only the distinguished and the elderly who were regarded as appropriate subjects. But Josephine wasn’t just a dancer, Marcel argued, she was ‘a phenomenon’33 – everything about her life would be of interest to the public – and in writing his book he prefigured the formula of the modern celebrity memoir. Alongside the story of Josephine’s life he added the kind of random facts that he knew would fascinate her fans – lists of her most extraordinary presents and famous admirers; tips on beauty and lifestyle; even the recipe for her favourite meal, corned beef hash and hot cakes with syrup. Marcel also knew better than to challenge the fantasy logic of her recollections: he was her storyteller, not her historian and uncritically he wrote down everything Josephine invented for him, from her ‘Romeo and Juliet’ parents, who’d had to run away from their families in order to marry, to her own instant Cinderella transformation from starveling child to beautiful star. He allowed her to contradict herself at will. At one point in the memoir she boasted of her dedication to her art – ‘To live is to dance, I would love to die breathless, exhausted at the end of a dance’ – while at another she berated the ‘artificial life’ into which her talent had forced her, promising that some day she would turn her back on the ‘sad choices’ she had made and retire to the country: ‘I’ll marry simply,’ she declared. ‘I’ll have children and lots of animals. I love them; I want to live in peace among children and animals.’34

  This notion bore little relation to Josephine’s actual life, however. Even as she painted this picture of imagined, saintly calm she was busy forming ambitious plans for her career, and doing so with the help of her latest lover, a man who styled himself Count Pepito de Abatino. She’d met Pepito through his cousin Zito, an artist who drew caricatures at Zelli’s bar. Somewhere in his late twenties or early thirties, he was a thin, sallow Sicilian, yet to Josephine’s uncritical eyes he was the very image of an Italian count: his high forehead framed by dark, slicked-back hair; his expression given an air of intellectual dash by the monocle he affected. From a certain angle, Pepito reminded her of the film actor Adolphe Menjou (the handsome support to Rudolf Valentino in The Sheik). And his manners, too, seemed as polished as any movie star’s as he gazed at her through his monocle as if she were an object of rare beauty, telling her she was the greatest dancer he had ever seen, writing her elaborate love letters and pampering her with exquisite care.

  In reality Pepito’s breeding was as much an accessory as the yellow and white spats he favoured. He’d invented his title after he abandoned his modest trade as a stonemason to make a new life for himself as a dance partner and gigolo. Josephine’s friends saw through his façade. Bricktop dismissed him as a ‘bum’ and a ‘fraud’,35 distrusting his over-perfumed pomade, his flashy rings and bright clothes, and assuming that his intentions were simply to fleece Josephine for money. However, Josephine herself wasn’t too concerned about the truth of Pepito’s pretensions; what mattered to her were his promises to advance her career.

  It was precisely because Pepito was a self-made creation that he was able to understand and help her as he did. Unlike all the other Pygmalion figures in Josephine’s life he knew, from experience, how precarious her transformation felt. She might look like a star, even act like a star, but she didn’t yet have the confidence of one and she wanted guidance in refining the way she talked and conducted herself.

  Peptio was ready to offer her that guidance, and even more ready to help Josephine expand the range of her performing options. She was growing tired of the Charleston and the ‘banana dance’ and impatient to progress in her ambition to become a singer like Mistinguett. So far, however, none of her producers had made good on their promises to give her voice a trial and it was Pepito who sat Josephine down and told her she needed to make her own way. She needed to hire herself a singing teacher and she needed to find herself an independent platform.

  It was possibly not Pepito who engineered Josephine’s debut appearance on record, singing a sentimental little number called ‘Who’. The result was poor; she was accompanied by a mediocre band and her small soprano voice sounded weak and untrained. But it was he who organized Josephine into opening her own nightclub, where she could be fully in control of her material and image. Backed with cash from one of her admirers (a Dr Gaston Prieur who’d grown rich from colluding in medical insurance fraud) Pepito found and purchased a small premises on rue Fontaine, close to the heart of Montmartre, and on 14 December 1926, Chez Joséphine opened its doors to the public.

  As so often in her career, Josephine’s progress advanced on the wreckage of other people’s expectations. Just a block away was the Imperial, a club that had just changed its name to Josephine Baker’s Imperial after she’d signed a year-long contract to perform there. Not only had Josephine reneged on the deal, she’d also poached many of the Imperial’s staff – and a sizable chunk of its clientele once her own club opened.

  But Josephine felt justified by the superiority and originality of her project. She and Pepito had planned Chez Joséphine as a careful fusion of New and Old World styles. The menu created by their American chef offered chitlins, black-eyed peas and rooster combs alongside steak tartare and plover’s eggs, and Josephine’s own image was pitched somewhere between Harlem hostess and French diva. A report in Vogue described her sweeping into the club at around 1 a.m., with an entourage of some few favoured fans, her maids, chauffeur and little white dog. She wore a tulle dress with a blue snakeskin bodice and shoes to match, a diamond at her waist. Her dressing-room walls were covered with press cuttings and photographs of herself, and the dog bore the dark crimson imprint of her mouth where she’d kissed it.

  Yet there was an element of homeliness mixed in with Josephine’s glamour. Trotting by her side as she progressed through the club was her new pet nanny goat (Albert the pig wasn’t allowed to appear in public, but was given free rein in the kitchen, growing monstrously fat on leftovers). As she moved between tables she used tricks she’d learned back in St Louis, singling out susceptible men; pulling their moustaches and whispering coarse endearments in their ears. When she started to sing, she mixed raw, poignant blues numbers in among her repertory of romantic French ballads.

  She worked very, very hard at finessing her new skills, her own amibitions now driven by Pepito’s. He would sometimes get rough with her, his Sicilian machismo getting the better of him when he considered she was slacking in her daily practice. Once or twice he even hit her. But the regime worked. Patrons came to Chez Joséphine as early as seven or eight in the evening in order to secure a table, and they would wait patiently until the early hours of the morning, when she finally arrived to perform. The Aga Khan became a regular at the club, as did Colette, who also joined the lengthening line of older women taking a semi-maternal, semi-sexual interest in Josephine.

  Colette sent affectionate little notes, written on the paper doilies she picked up from her table at the club; she called Josephine my ‘little brown daughter’, and for a while the two women were rumoured to be lovers.36 Whatever the exact status of their relationship, it was a wonderful endorsement. Colette was cherished as one of France’s leading writers and her interest helped mark Josephine as a true Parisian. In the months that followed the opening of her club Josephine felt a distinct social change; invitations began to arrive for charity balls, fêtes and galas. She was asked to open the 1927 Tour de France, and she inspired a new dish, ‘Poulet Joséphine Baker’, at the Tour d’Argent restaurant.

  She was no longer the novelty jazz babe from Harlem. Under Pepito’s instruction, she continued to perfect her appearance: a vampish spit curl appeared in the dead centre of her forehead, her skin seemed to grow ever paler and she insisted on the accented ‘é’ of Joséphine whenever and wherever her name was written. When she opened in a new Folies show in April 1927, she was required to dance one retro ragamuffin number, but otherwi
se she was packaged in a far more classic Parisian style, her costumes including a skirt of marabou feathers and a metallic, low-cut bathing suit with rhinestone straps that followed the contours of her naked breasts. Even her trademark banana skirt was now encrusted with diamanté.

  High on the success of his project, Pepito expanded Josephine’s commercial potential and in addition to the Bakerfix endorsement he secured a mass advertising campaign with Pernod. Both of them were getting rich on the profits, but they were also in danger of over-reaching themselves. On 20 June 1927 they orchestrated a large press conference, in which they announced to the world that they had become man and wife. Josephine did most of the talking. She said that she’d agreed to marry Pepito on her twenty-first birthday and that her new husband had not only given her a huge diamond ring, but all the ‘jewels and heirlooms that have been in the family for generations’. The Abatinos were, she assured her audience, the real thing. She’d had them checked out by a private detective and they had ‘lots of coats of arms and everything. I understand they live in a big swell chateau.’37 Smiling at the room with breathtaking deceitfulness, Josephine assured journalists that she had never been married before and that it was all ‘so much fun’.

  Of course there were no jewels and no chateau, and there hadn’t been a wedding either – as Josephine wasn’t yet divorced from her last husband, Billy. However, as she started to flaunt her new ring and title around Paris, she believed for a brief moment that the story might stick. In America, at least, it was uncritically accepted, with the New York World running the headline ‘NEGRO DANCING GIRL BRIDE OF ROMAN COUNT’, and informing its readers that ‘Josephine Baker of Harlem adds a noble husband to conquests abroad’. According to Variety magazine, her ‘tie up with the count’ was being talked about everywhere. And if the white press gave the story prominence, the black papers ran with it for days, elaborating the grandeur of the match and even inventing quotes from Pepito’s father about his delight in having Josephine as his daughter-in-law.

  Rapidly the lie of her wedding became elevated into a story of black inspiration. The previous year some of the French-produced Josephine Baker dolls had appeared in Harlem shops – a source of local pride. Now the New York Amsterdam Press boasted that Josephine had ‘made a more auspicious venture on the sea of matrimony than any number of American women within memory’.38 Black girls across America began to dream of emulating Josephine; to them she was all that the movie stars in Picture-Play had been to Tallulah. The singer Bobby Short was a child at the time and recalled how mothers and daughters in his hometown of Danville, Illinois, loved to talk over the tale of Josephine’s success, saying to each other, ‘My God, she’s conquered France and now she’s married this count.’39

  In Paris, however, reporters digging for extra information rapidly discovered that there was no trace of any wedding ceremony, nor of any noble family called Abatino. They didn’t enjoy being duped, and they made their displeasure clear to Josephine in a spate of vitriolic comment. Some of the attacks in the press were so fierce that she feared she might be arrested, and frantically she began to backtrack, pretending it had all been a joke that had got out of hand: ‘Since it’s amusing to be married I let it out around town that I was – you know how false news spreads.’

  It was, in the end, all good publicity. And perhaps that was all it was intended to be, given that Marcel’s book, Les Mémoires de Joséphine Baker, was due to appear in the bookshops very soon. Three weeks later, Josephine’s stunt was forgiven and forgotten as journalists mined the memoir for new gossip. La Baker was again the public’s darling. However, hubris was always a besetting issue in Pepito’s plans – the Josephine Baker magazine, which he launched, edited by Simenon and featuring photographs of Josephine and her famous clientele, floundered miserably. And he again miscalculated when he judged that this was the moment to push Josephine into the movies.

  Offers from Hollywood had been arriving regularly at Josephine’s door, but up till now she had resisted them. Scriptwriters seemed unable to imagine roles for her beyond the black stereotypes she had worked so hard to escape, principally that of the comic plantation nigger girl. But Pepito was keen to persuade her that a film appearance would dramatically enlarge her audience – cinema was now very big business in France, with many of the traditional Boulevard theatres converting to large movie houses – and she finally yielded to his arguments when a script arrived from the French novelist Maurice Dekobra, which she was assured had been written especially for her.

  La Sirène des Tropiques told the story of a young Antillean woman, Papitou, who falls in love with a French engineer and follows him back to Paris in the hope of marrying him. Diverted into a successful career as a dancer, Papitou fails to locate her engineer until after he has become engaged to another woman, at which point she heroically renounces her great love, assuring the audience and herself that ‘sacrifice is the purest form of joy on earth’.40 As a plot line it was hardly original – Tallulah had acted in a dozen similar stories about headstrong young women with hearts of gold – but what was important to Josephine was that the role of Papitou transcended race; ultimately, she was just a girl in love. Or at least that was how the film was presented to her. Later Josephine claimed the script had not been adequately translated for her and that she had been unaware of how many crude jokes about colour it contained. (One especially offensive, and extended, gag involved Papitou falling into a coal bin and causing a terrified elderly woman to believe she’d seen a black devil; then subsequently falling into a flour bin and causing the same woman to believe she’d seen a ghost.)

  The crassness of the material was also exacerbated by Josephine’s inability to transcend it. She hated being on set; like Diana, she was tormented by the blinding lights and interminable waits between shots. She was also usually exhausted, having sung at her club until dawn, managing only a couple of hours’ sleep before she had to get up for filming. Fatigue and irritability not only made her behave badly, they also made her difficult to direct.* At the premiere on 30 December 1927, Josephine wept, unable to recognize herself as this ‘ugly silly person’ up on the screen. No one on set had been able to persuade her to mute her usual performance style, and her comic eye-rolling grin and vibrating energy came across as manic, even freakish.

  Josephine was impatient for artistic maturity, and yet it seemed to take so much time and trouble. The divinity of the great stars still dangled unreachably above her. Florence Mills had recently died – officially from a botched appendectomy, but probably from tuberculosis – and most of Harlem had been on the street to watch her funeral cortège pass by and see the flocks of birds that were released from an aeroplane in tribute to Blackbirds, her signature show. In jealous anguish, Josephine wondered how she would ever attract such love. Although she was making progress as a singer, even the musicians who played for her thought her voice would never have sufficient power ‘to throw the velvet’, and she was still only performing to a very small, select audience at her club. By the end of 1927, Pepito decided that in order to accelerate her transformation (as well as put some distance between Josephine and her horrible film debut) it was time to leave Paris and go out on tour. In an emotional speech, Josephine announced to journalists that she was going away to be reborn: ‘The Charleston, the bananas, finished.† Understand I have to be worthy of Paris, I have to become an artist.’

  The tour Pepito arranged was monumental. Between early 1928 and late 1929 Josephine sang and danced in twenty-four cities across Europe and South America; in each one she also performed in a local nightclub, temporarily renamed Chez Joséphine. Travelling with her and her entourage of staff were fifteen steamer trunks of equipment, including 137 costumes, 196 pairs of shoes, 64 kilos of face powder and 30,000 publicity shots to distribute en route. Exhausting as the schedule was, it gave Josephine intensive schooling in the skills required to be a star. As the centrepiece of the show, she had to be able to hold a performance together in the face of bad stages,
inadequate bands or hostile audiences, and she had to learn tough lessons in the art of projecting her voice, body and personality. Offstage she worked with singing and dancing coaches; language tutors to improve her French and manicure her English; conversation classes to coax her into expressing herself more intelligently. Even at the end of 1927, a tang of the feral still lingered around her image; stories that she ate with her hands at mealtimes were untrue, but many believed them. Two years, however, would work a remarkable change, as revealed by the picture taken by Vogue photographer George Hoyningen-Huene in 1929. It wasn’t just the sultry choreography of the photograph that registered her new sophistication – the fluid line of her body echoed by the fall of pearls and the silken material held delicately between her hands – what was remarkable was the composure of her gaze and the stillness of her presence. Of the dancer who’d been compared to a kangaroo, a boxer, a monkey and a savage, there was not a trace.

  For Pepito, however, success came at a price. As Josephine shed her St Louis accent and social awkwardness, she inevitably began to outgrow her lover. He remained necessary to her in certain ways – as a professional advisor and a compliant ear to her worries and complaints – but she could no longer take seriously his flashy rings and spats, his carefully assembled stock of compliments and small talk. He began to seem almost pathetic in contrast to the men who were beginning to pursue her, among them Crown Prince Gustaf Adolf of Sweden, the irrepressible Feodor Chaliapin, and Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-Gris, the Swiss architect who called himself Le Corbusier.

  Josephine and Le Corbusier had met in South America and become lovers two months before the end of her tour. The architect was far from her usual type, with his thick pebble glasses and long, clever face, but she was both flattered and captivated by his brilliance, listening raptly to his vision of architecture as an agent of social transformation, and posing willingly for the erotic sketches he drew of her. They met again, by design, on the boat travelling back from Rio to Bordeaux, and it was during this voyage that Josephine developed the idea of one day using her money to build a village in the French countryside, where people of every colour and class could live in a Corbusian-style utopia.